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Developing in-house residential care for children

Published: 10/06/2021

Flintshire’s Cabinet members will be asked to support the move to become a direct provider of residential care for children when they meet on 15 June.

To secure change, we have set a commitment to develop our own residential care home provision for children and young people. The proposal centres around the priorities for the next three financial years through the delivery of the following projects:

1. Respite and support for a growing number of disabled children and their parents/carers.

2. Providing specialist therapeutic assessment and support.

3. Emergency provision: to enable an effective response to crisis situations.

4. Small Group Homes: to enable children to live within their local community.

Flintshire’s Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Social Services, Councillor Christine Jones, said:

“We are committed to ensuring children and young people receive high quality care so they are, and feel, safe, loved and supported to develop the skills and resilience to lead fulfilled lives.

“Our main aim is to support families to care for their own children, and to prevent them, if safe to do so, from becoming looked after. This is what the majority of families want and where most children will best achieve their potential.

“Where children need to be looked after we want to ensure that we can make suitable and timely placements.  We have some great local providers offering high quality residential care for children and young people.  However, placements are in short supply and we need to build capacity locally.  Out of area private sector provision is expensive and as a Corporate Parent this is not what we want for our children.  We want to keep them close to home.  Developing our own residential homes will really help to provide our young people with an improved local service.“